Ep. 337: Gatekeepers Ruin Everything, feat. Charles Harriott

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America, and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJMentalModels.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models, episode 337. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And today, I'm keeping my word. We said he would be back. He's back. You can stop bugging me. I got Charles Harriott on the line. Charles, how's it going, my friend? Speaker 3: It's doing fabulous. Doing fabulous. It's a beautiful day here in Florida. Speaker 2: I am glad. I didn't realize you lived in Florida. I thought you were in like Colorado or something. Speaker 3: No, no, no. I mean, I've been to Colorado. Florida is where I was born and raised. I live here as like my home base right now. Been in America probably the longest I've been for the past like six or seven years. I've been here all the way since last October now. Speaker 2: That's a lot for you. People not familiar with you may not be aware of how unusual it is for you to be stationary that long. You're of course quite closely affiliated with like the BJJ Globetrotters guys. You're always on the road. I'm following you on social and I see all of your tours. Tell me a little bit about yourself for people who aren't familiar. Where might they know you from and what does kind of your Jiu-Jitsu journey look like? Speaker 3: My name is Charles Harriott. I've been doing martial arts since I could walk. As far as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I started off doing a little bit of no-gi stuff a little over 20 years ago. Started into the gi about 18 years ago. Uh, De La Hiva team, white to brown, brown to black, Cross and Gracie team. Around 2018, I started traveling. You might have seen me on BJJ Globetrotters video. I think I've got like seven or eight of those on YouTube. I've also made five instructionals on BJJ Fanatics. And back in the day, I used to go to tournaments. Nowadays, I mainly just go and travel around and do seminars, mostly through the USA and Europe, a little bit of Asia. Yeah, that's probably if you see me meeting one of those things, I've I've probably I'm a little bit older, so I've probably rolled with your coach. I don't know. I've met a lot of bunch of people like it's very strange. I'll meet the most random people and then I'll find out that like I competed against their coach at like blue belt at a tournament or something and like some weird forever ago thing. So it's kind of a a fun small world through the travels or that like there's actually a guy at my gym that I'm training at here in Gainesville, Rising Tide, that I'm training with and turns out his very first coach when he used to live in New York, now lives in Greenville, North Carolina. And I stopped through his gym and for an open mat like 10 years ago or something like that. And we and he showed me the picture. I'm like, I know that guy. And like this this Jiu-Jitsu is such an interesting small world. Speaker 2: It really is. You know, they talk in movies about six degrees of separation, right? In Jiu-Jitsu, it feels like it's got to be two degrees. Pretty much everyone is only one or two hops away from everyone else in the sport, it seems. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of cool that way. So like another great example of that is um back when he was younger, Frederick Vosgren, you probably might know him. He's the guy like making like really big waves right now on Instagram. He's an MMA fighter in Germany. He's there's that famous video of him recently like he's like hanging on to his leg crawling after him. He goes by the nickname the Neanderthal. He's having like a really big MMA moment in Germany right now. When I think he was young, like 19 or 20, I met him at Globetrotters and Christian, the owner of Globetrotters, got tired of making tank tops and so he set a rule that you'd only have a tank top if you can tap out Freddy. And I was like, he's a black belt, but I'm like, I'm a black belt. I can tap this guy out. No, absolutely not. I tried my damndest to tap out Freddy. It was impossible. And so since Freddy became the benchmark for getting a tank top, I don't think anyone's gotten a tank top since. He ended BJJ Globetrotters tank tops because he just is an absolute wall and and this is when he was probably 20 pounds lighter than he is now. He's even more jacked now. It's crazy. Speaker 2: And another thing that's interesting about your story, of course, you uh come from a software background similar to myself. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: And we were talking beforehand about, you know, what would be a fun interesting topic that maybe draws on our pasts and is also relevant to Jiu-Jitsu. And we were kind of circling around this and the the one thing that kind of kept coming up in our discussion as a theme was just this idea of gatekeeping and kind of denying other people joy in Jiu-Jitsu or denying them the ability to do Jiu-Jitsu their way. Um this is a broad topic, but I think it's really worth discussing because there's a lot of this that happens in Jiu-Jitsu, you know, kind of trying to deny people the ability to do things a certain way or claiming that their way isn't pure enough or good enough. I'm really not a big fan of gatekeeping in general because it shuts down growth and communication and connection. But I'm going to turn this over to you to maybe open up the topic here. What's on the agenda here? What exactly is gatekeeping? How do people do it in Jiu-Jitsu and why is it bad in your opinion? Speaker 3: I think that what tends to happen a lot in Jiu-Jitsu, and this isn't really just Jiu-Jitsu, it's kind of almost every social group I've ever been a part of. I've I was a B-boy, I was a breakdancer before, same thing happens in that community. I've seen it happen in the skateboarding community, all kinds of communities. So the whole idea is that you in your upbringing in whatever you're doing. So say that you come up in a traditional white gi only Jiu-Jitsu school. And then you may maybe you're a purple belt, right? And then you have a buddy and he came up in a 10th Planet school and he's visiting you. And you invite him to your gym to come train. And maybe he's a brown belt, right? He's been training even he's been training longer than you, but he comes to your gym and you give him a gi and he can't tie his belt. And you're like, are you really a brown belt? You can't tie a belt? Do you even do Jiu-Jitsu, right? Like because that's your presumption is the only way you could be doing Jiu-Jitsu is if you're doing it in a gi and that you're tying a belt, even though you know, even if you're a purple belt at that point, like that 10th Planet exists and they're no-gi only and that they also do grappling, but perhaps your gym has decided to tell you that that's not really Jiu-Jitsu, that they're doing something else, right? And it's this idea that we narrow the definition of something to exclude people who have different opinions or approaches from us. Because I think oftentimes things are always kind of distilled down to there's us and there's them. It's not always us versus them, but there's always that this distinction between our gym or our people or our tribe or our group does things this way, and other people do things that way, and our way is better. And I think that that's very destructive because there's almost always something to learn. All of my travels, tons of gyms do stuff differently. From I've been to Gracie Barra gyms, Carlson Gracie gyms, 10th Planet gyms, Pedigo gyms, Alliance, so many of the different affiliations and factions, Luta Livre gyms, Sambo gyms even, Judo facilities, like and at the end of the day, there's always something to learn. And I'm very much a when in Rome kind of guy. And so like if you want me to wear a gi, sure. If you want me to not wear a gi, sure. You want to play leg locks? Great. You want to do a takedown roll only if I'm at a wrestling school? Great, let's play takedowns. Because there's always something to learn and I can take it, bring it back and incorporate it into my style. I really don't think that anybody has a monopoly on the right way. I really just think it's, what are you using Jiu-Jitsu for, right? Like if you're just doing self-defense Jiu-Jitsu, you probably never need to learn how to do an Imanari roll. Probably never need to learn how to do it for your purposes. But if you're just trying to have fun and you saw Imanari do magical things back in the day and you're like, I want to spin around too. Or, you know, like there's to me, as long as you're not harming anybody, and if there are injuries that happen, right? Because it's a combat sport, it just happens. But if everybody involved is in a consensual adult situation, then even then like, because you might be from a gym where everybody rolls light all the time and safety's number one. And then you walk into an MMA gym where everyone's bleeding and you're like, what's wrong with you people? This this is bad. It's like, well, they're preparing for professional mixed martial arts. Bleeding happens sometimes. And like that's the nature of how these guys are going to grapple. It's not going to be the same as if you're at a gym that's full of soccer moms and and dads, you know? Speaker 2: Yeah. Something I've observed over the years is that there's a lot of different ways that people in Jiu-Jitsu do this. And you're completely right to point out that this is not a Jiu-Jitsu specific problem. It's just part of the human condition, right? We tend to kind of gravitate towards our tribe and we tend to kind of look at people who do something different as being an an other or a them, which is really not good, but it is something that happens. And you definitely see this in Jiu-Jitsu. I remember when I was much, much earlier in my journey, like all of the white and blue belts are doing right now, I presume. I would search for and subscribe to basically every single Jiu-Jitsu podcast I could possibly find. Shout out to all of the white belts and the blue belts who found us, by the way, really appreciate you. Um but I remember back in the day when I started, there was this podcast called The Fight Works Podcast. It was like one of the more popular ones back in like the late 2000s for Jiu-Jitsu, I believe. And I was just consuming a bunch of their stuff. And I remember they had one episode on where like Renzo Gracie came on and just tore the shit out of Henner Gracie and was going on about how he's doing a bad job of representing the sport because he's claiming his Jiu-Jitsu is the purest. And then they had Henner on to do a kind of a counterpoint about that. And I remember thinking to myself, these people are like really closely related. They're, you know, one of them is the other one's uncle. Speaker 3: They're literally family. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. One is the other one's uncle. And they thought that the best thing that they could do is go on some random person's podcast and just air all of their family drama publicly in the intent of kind of determining which of them has the truest vein of Jiu-Jitsu. What the fuck is this? This is crazy. But the thing is, the more you get into the sport, the more you realize this happens in a lot of different places. On Mental Models, we've talked before many times about the kind of nefarious cult-like tactics that a lot of gyms use to try to influence and keep control of their students and maintain their memberships even when they want to leave. And that kind of gatekeeping is a big part of that as well, trying to convince people that your way is the one true way and all of the other ways are wrong. And this manifests all over the place in Jiu-Jitsu, whether it be like the gi or no-gi debate, or which rule set is best, or what what are your feelings on ecological dynamics, right? There's so many people who have it in their head that there's a way to do things and they gatekeep other people's ability to express their opinion or to weigh alternate options. And regardless of whether people are right or wrong in their opinions, I think kind of shutting down that dialogue is probably not good for the growth of the sport overall. Speaker 3: I completely agree. And I think that as you go through all of all those things that you just mentioned, it's when you don't know, right? In the beginning of your Jiu-Jitsu career, you're very much in a situation where you're trusting your coach to to guide you. And if your coach says that everybody else in town is teaching fake Jiu-Jitsu, except us. And so if you ever leave here, you're not going to get good Jiu-Jitsu anymore. Or and like I remember when I first started Jiu-Jitsu, there was a whole like negative thing around YouTube and instructionals. The whole thing was like, oh, this guy learned his Jiu-Jitsu from YouTube. As if it was a slight. It was just like, you don't have real Jiu-Jitsu, you don't have a coach, you learned from YouTube. And don't to be fair, the quality of Jiu-Jitsu on YouTube back in the early 2000s was not what it is today. Right? So there was there was a fair argument because a lot of it was a bit of blind leading the blind. But even back then like, and so you could see it in a genuine way, like I don't want you getting hurt. At least that was the way that I took it was like, oh, if I learn these moves too soon or out of order or this or that, I might hurt one of my training partners. And I think that appeal to safety, I think is one of the most nefarious ones and I think it's how leg locks have been kind of made to be seen as a a hyper advanced thing when truthfully at the end of the day like, like any other part of Jiu-Jitsu, with knowledge and understanding, they can be done safely. Without knowledge and understanding, they can be catastrophically dangerous. But a Kimura or even a guard jump and like all of this stuff are equally dangerous if done without understanding and safety of your training partners. And so I think it's it really the easiest highlight is or even in the case of some gyms, takedowns, right? Takedowns can be immensely dangerous. Wrestling and Judo can be immensely dangerous if not done in a safe way. But then I've almost always you'll find something that is considered horribly dangerous or horribly advanced in one place is a complete fundamental if you go somewhere else that is learned on day one. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Well said, well said. Speaker 3: And so then the question is like, why is this advanced? Like why are we actually saving it? Is it arbitrary? Is it my coach is just doing what his coach taught him and he doesn't even know why we're doing it in this order? Or is it because my coach isn't very good at this thing? And so he doesn't want to have his lack exposed early on, so we can push it off into the future? Or is it genuinely that this is painful and uncomfortable and he understands that if he teaches this early on, he's going to lose students. Right? Because there's gyms where you're not allowed to roll for months or sometimes even six months. And the reason is, most people don't actually enjoy rolling Jiu-Jitsu. The idea of some stranger sweating in their eye and crushing their face isn't fun for a large percentage of the regular population. But if I don't let you find that out for six months, I can have a six-month member who enjoys performative, executive Jiu-Jitsu self-defense techniques that they can do without having to go through that existential dread of being dominated by another human, which I think it's as a business model, it's not a bad business model. If you're a young 22-year-old, you might be like, that's that's crazy. They won't let you roll on the first day. But if you look at there's almost always a reason that you can look at the logic and be like, you know what, that makes sense. And if you don't like it, the great thing about 2025, especially in America and most of Europe and a lot of the world is there's another gym. There's almost always another gym now. And that's in my opinion, the beautiful thing about our current time. Because 20 years ago, there probably wasn't another gym unless you were in a major city. It was learn this guy's way or this girl's way or don't learn. Speaker 2: That is a really interesting thing to unpack here. Just the reasons why people do things the way they do and our perceptions of that and how that changes depending on where we came up. Because like you, when I hear, well, my gym doesn't let me roll for two months. For a long time, I would have taken that as a red flag, like you might not want to train there. That might be some bushido stuff. But more and more coaches that I really respect are starting to institute rules like that. To the point where I'm starting to think that maybe they're actually onto something. Rolling is fun. It's ultimately the thing that keeps most of us addicted to the sport, but it's also one of the most intimidating things and it's also one of the places where people suffer the most idiot injuries. The old idea was when people train at Jiu-Jitsu, you throw them into the shark tank right away. You let them get beat up because that's how they learn the effectiveness of the sport. Speaker 3: Yep, they got to believe in it. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, okay, from like a 1990s Gracie Jiu-Jitsu mindset, maybe that makes sense. Like you got to prove yourself and we're scrappy and no one knows who we are. I think people these days, they know what Jiu-Jitsu is, or at least there's enough information out there that they can be convinced of the efficacy of this system. But the the thing is though, there are a lot of real dumb injuries that happen very early on in people's journeys. And if you can prevent that, you can not only keep them in the sport longer, but you can also dramatically improve the quality of their lives because you don't have, you know, two-week white belts tearing their ACLs before they even know what they're doing. So, I'm starting to open my mind to the fact that maybe there's merit to that sort of thing. And again, with leg locks, you brought up another great example there. Leg locks are a perfect example of a technique that for a long time was considered almost too dangerous to teach in the gym. And a lot of this is just perception and the lessons that you were taught early on that you just never really questioned. I always tell people, I mean, look, yeah, it sucks if someone puts you in a heel hook and tears your ACL, but you can die from a very traditional fundamental choke hold. You know, from a rear naked or a collar choke or a gi choke. Speaker 3: Someone crushes your trachea and that's it. Speaker 2: Yeah, you can die from that. People have died from that and have had strokes from that. And when you look at things from that lens, you know, having a knee injury doesn't seem so bad. And so I'm not saying that heel hooks aren't dangerous. I mean, obviously they are, but we've conditioned ourselves to believe that certain techniques are super dangerous, but you know what, like cutting off the blood oxygen to someone's brain, that's okay. That's totally safe, which is absolutely not true. Like there's danger to that stuff, but it comes down to how we were told things, what we questioned. And that's an example of very subtle gatekeeping that happens early on where you're your instructor kind of tells you right at the get-go, here are the good things and here are the bad things and never cross into the bad things. Speaker 3: And those lessons can stick with you subconsciously well after they remain useful. Speaker 2: I completely agree and it's very interesting because beyond because you said good and bad, right? You didn't say safe and dangerous. Because there's a stigma behind leg locks still have it, but less than they used to, but wrist locks definitely still have it, right? So like there's a dirtiness about them, right? It's not even that they're necessarily dangerous, it's that like it's that that's it's not it's not real. It's a dirty trick, right? So like wrist locks and and heel hooks are like they're dirty. And I remember that because like back in the day, there's the whole like Zapatero thing and people throwing shoes at people for doing leg locks. Like like that was a thing. And that was like right before my time, but still going on when I first started, but I remember hearing those those stories. But even if that's not that intense anymore, it's still a thing where you might be colored by that, oh, my coach thinks that this is a dirty technique. I don't want to be a dirty fighter. On the other hand, like some people really embrace like their inner villain. They're like, that's the dirty stuff. That's what I want to learn, right? There's And so like that um that kind of almost like morality judgment behind a technique. They where it's as far as safety, they've looked into it and like pretty much linear techniques, arm bars, knee bars, etcetera, are tend to have less injuries than twisting techniques. Speaker 3: Or I would presume at least less severe injuries. That would be my guess. Speaker 2: Um I don't know about the severity. I can only speak to this might be some second-hand information, but someone was looking at just the numbers of injuries in competition. And it tends to be heel hooks and Kimuras, which are both twisting techniques, right? That you get a lot of injuries from. There was that horrific one with the two 16-year-olds recently where the dude like practically just spun the other kid's arm off. But it's and they were like, well, what why does that happen? And the thought behind it, I know a couple of gyms, and I looked at the uh the Bodega Jiu-Jitsu guys, they put on a tournament and I thought the rule set was very interesting. They had beginner, which had no twisting submissions. And then they had advanced, which had all submissions. That was the only two rule sets they had, beginner and advanced. And I might be misquoting some of it, it might be different. Sorry if I messed it up, but I thought that was interesting because like, okay, so to because in the case of a straight joint lock, we can as the referee just say, limb is straight, you're done. You're a beginner. That's very clear. Whereas with a bent arm lock, Kimura, toe hold, etcetera, you have to really actually apply that torsional force to finish it. I might have you heel exposed, fully locked, dead to rights, but if you put weight in that heel, I can't finish. I can't finish it while it's while it's weighted if I don't know what I'm doing. Same thing with a Kimura, how many times you've seen someone have a fully locked Kimura, the other guy's grabbing his thigh and the white or blue belt is cranking on it and he just can't finish the Kimura. And it leads I think people to be a bit more explosive in their execution of the technique. Now this is just my personal view, so I was like, okay, I understood. To me, that delineation between once you are advanced, you can twist things, as a beginner, you can't twist things. To me, at least that felt more like cohesive. And there I am, I'm still drawing a line between beginner and advanced, but it was an interesting way and at least the logic behind the rules made sense. Because if you look at almost any rule set, there's going to be some stuff that makes absolutely no sense, right? Like IBJJF, heel hooks are illegal at every single belt in the gi. There's no time in the gi you're allowed to heel hook. But Coyote Guard is perfectly fine. And the Coyote Guard, if you don't know, is a half guard where you're effectively reaping the person's knee in order to get them to be swept. But it's perfectly fine. Not illegal, no problem with it at all. And so it's fascinating, it's like, this is definitely affecting someone's knee, putting it in danger. I've had my knee torn by someone playing Coyote Guard on me, but that's legal. And so like the rule sets are always going to get funny, but I think I'm kind of going down a rabbit hole on on the rules part, but I think it's interesting just to have people think about things and understand that like the rules of tournaments aren't going to always make sense, but like learn and take care of your partner. Because what I've found with every submission, twisters, neck cranks, heel hooks, everything, as long as you and your partner agree that exploding out of things is not the answer, you can do anything. I can do a fully locked heel hook, catch it, expose your heel, let go. I can do a twister, catch it, let go. Almost anything that allows me the ability to let go of you before injury happens, which to me is the beauty of Jiu-Jitsu, is the ability to move and have a hard roll, but stop short of injuring you. To me, that's that's why Jiu-Jitsu's great. And I think that you can apply that to the majority of the game. Same with even takedowns. I can just do a takedown and not drive you through the mat, right? I could do my takedown and then I can stop before I smash you through the mat. That's possible as long as I'm willing to fail occasionally on my takedowns. Speaker 2: Something that I have noticed is in the Jiu-Jitsu community, a lot of coaches are just terrified of people making mistakes. And a lot of coaching seems to be informed by this idea that our students can't make mistakes, right? I'm terrified of giving my student bad advice because then they're going to have bad habits and it'll take 10 years to untangle that. So this leads to a an approach to coaching that is very prescriptive sometimes, where the coach will sit there and micromanage every aspect of the student's movements, make sure that the technique looks exactly perfect and then move on. There's basically no latitude or room given to the student to experiment or make mistakes. And I think that's an example of kind of shutting down that creativity and also a form of gatekeeping. Something that, you know, we've said many times in this podcast is that if you want to get good at Jiu-Jitsu, you've got to go into those scenarios where you could make mistakes. If you try to lead a Jiu-Jitsu journey where your goal is, I'm just never going to make mistakes, you're not going to get very far because you're never going to be doing anything risky or unusual. So, in a lot of ways, we want to encourage people to be creative, as long as like you said, nobody's getting hurt out of it. That's really the one thing, right? You can be as creative as you want as long as you're not harming another person. And some people might hear the story that you brought up about saying no rotational submissions at a lower rank. I understand the logic and I maybe I somewhat agree with it in some situations, but I can also see people pushing back on that and saying, well, are you now creating a problem where there's going to be a stigma around heel hooks and Kimuras and now this skill set won't get developed properly and people will be afraid of them. So it's a very difficult thing and I don't know if there's a right answer, right? There definitely are some techniques that I think most people would agree, we probably don't want to allow these just unregulated or unrestricted. But then there's other times where yes, a technique has danger, but Jiu-Jitsu is inherently dangerous and part of what we need to do is equip people with the knowledge to work safely in that dangerous space. And how do we balance that? Like how do we manage to in some situations, maybe put in those restrictions, do that gatekeeping because we think it's best for safety. But on the other hand, how do we make sure we haven't gone too far and over-regulated things to the point where now we're kind of oppressing our students, so to speak. Speaker 3: Oh, you said so many things that I I almost have to like take notes to that how I want to respond to each one. I'm going to come back, remind me if I don't mention the uh notion of being too prescriptive. I want to come to that one at the end because I have a long thing to say about that. When it comes back to the techniques and banning linear versus rotational, it's in my view, getting past that level of kind of spastic panic. Because everyone there's the old trope of the spazzy white belt, right? But all that spazzy white belt really is, is it's just somebody who's nervous. It's just somebody who's nervous and that adrenaline and they don't know what to do and so that that fear, much like you said earlier, of making a mistake, of doing the wrong thing, leads them to do whatever they do in a very kind of herky-jerky like, oh, I should do that. I should do that. In a very like almost panicked way. And like even just imitating that feeling, like it'll make them get out of breath because what are the classic things that beginners do? They go as hard as they can, they get exhausted after a minute and they want to take a break. Or if they have a hip reputation, like a history in sports, they don't want to take a break and they're pushing through, redlining their body and that's when they usually get hurt. And I think it's interesting because I think that I've even seen situations where especially with kids where there's no submissions allowed. That they're stuck only doing positional work until they've proven to their coach that they're not going to freak out and injure somebody. And if you look at it, well, okay, are they going to develop it? Of course, they're they're not going to develop something you don't have them do. But I think teaching people in a way to be in control of their acceleration. Because at the end of the day, injuries usually happen due to a high acceleration. If I accelerate quickly doing almost anything, that's when I'm in a vulnerability to injure myself or my training partner. If I deeply understand what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, and I'm given the freedom to tinker with it, suddenly I can figure out how much force is required for a given scenario. However, if I'm limited to kind of, I must do this in this exact order all the time or it's bad Jiu-Jitsu, that I think can be very demoralizing and like you said earlier, very prescriptive. Now the hard part is, part of the reason as black belts that people come to us to learn Jiu-Jitsu is that they have a view that we have something they want. We have knowledge, experience and abilities that they would like to have. That's why they're learning from us. If we didn't have anything they wanted, there'd be no reason to come to us. They could just learn themselves on their own through experience, just roll with their friends or maybe buy an instructional. So the reason why someone comes to a coach is because they believe that coach has something to help them with. And as a coach, it's so tempting to be like, I'll just tell them to do what I would do in that scenario. And I think that's the way that most of us have learned Jiu-Jitsu from the beginning. Either there was a curriculum that your coach was teaching you from the scratch and you're going to learn arm bar first, then you're going to learn triangle, then you're going to learn Omoplata, then you're going to learn arm bar triangle Omoplata series, and then you're going to learn the Kimura from guard, and then you're going to learn the hip bump sweep. And there's a curriculum that builds and that shows connections and you learn Jiu-Jitsu that way. Or you have the Q&A method where you have a student and they're like, hey coach, I want to beat so and so. And the coach is like, well, I beat so and so by doing this. So I'll teach you how to do this guard pass and this submission. But that prescription of this is the answer, it does in my opinion, rob the student of being able to figure it out themselves. But at the same time, not having to figure out everything themselves is why they have a coach. Right? Like if they wanted to have to reinvent Jiu-Jitsu on their own, they wouldn't need a coach. But at the same time, if you provide an environment with cues and goals that will allow this person to run into the right problems and then ask you the right questions, then they're able to get what they're learning in the context of a problem that is relevant to them right now. Because one of the things that I've always realized, I remember this when I had the lucky opportunity to get to be one of the instructors at a Hader Gracie camp in Austria a few years back. And I was the only non-Hader Gracie black belt who was teaching. And I watched Hader teach, if I remember correctly, it was just an arm bar. It was the version of arm bar that he did. And it had way more steps and way more details than any other arm bar that I've ever learned. But I realized looking at it is like each one of these very particular specific details are his answer to a problem he had with a training partner or genre of training partners when he was arm barring people over his career. He's installed all of these unique details to handle this wide swath of problems that may occur when you're trying to arm bar someone. And so whenever you miss one of those details, you come by and correct you and be like, hey, you missed that detail. Because when he does it in that exact way, in that exact order, there's virtually no one on earth who can stop him from arm barring them. So if I take Hader Gracie's perfect arm bar and I do it the way that he does it, ostensibly, I'll have the same results. Well, obviously that's not entirely true. I don't have his body type, his flexibility, his experience, his timing, his ability to customize on the spot. I don't have any of that. But if I don't understand what these details are for, when those scenarios come up, I'm helpless. But if I give someone the skeleton of an arm bar and then people start escaping their arm bar and then they run into a problem like, hey, this is happening. Well, then now I can either prescribe that detail that I use or I can tell them what that detail is solving. And they might come up with their own detail. And then we keep evolving and you can iterate over time and you're not going to get to exactly Hader Gracie's arm bar. But ideally, if you think about what all the details in the Hader Gracie arm bar, what problems they're solving, and you have your students solve all those same problems, all those possible defenses and counters and and escapes, I in principle, your student should be able to come up with something that is similarly effective. Now, are they going to do it in one class? Of course not. You're not going to try to get them from zero to Hader Gracie in one class. But the iteration, I think to me, that's what gives your student volition and power is that rather than you prescribing them a solution, you're helping them understand the problem so they can prescribe their own solution. But where I always get stuck is like, but a percentage of my students just want me to give them my answer. And am I doing them a disservice and like almost being paternal to them and saying, no, I'm not going to give you a solution because I know what's best for you. Speaker 2: Yeah. That's a really interesting insight and something that I've never really thought about. You can kind of look at the way that someone applies a technique almost like, you know, cross-sectioning a tree, cutting down a tree and taking a look at the rings inside the tree to see how it grew. And I think that's very much the same with how all of us teach different techniques and the variances between them. Because like you said, if you teach an arm bar and I teach an arm bar, there's probably going to be different things that you might consider to be the key details versus what I would, or maybe we do them slightly differently. And all of those things were evolutions that came about because of problems that you and I faced that were unique to us. Maybe some of those problems are generalized where they can be easily copied by other people, but there's also going to be things that you do because of your specific body type or that I do because of the experiences that I've had and things that didn't work. And so, like you talked about with Hader, you know, you develop an option that you can use in that situation. If the person defends the technique in one way, well, here's my counter to that. And the result is over time, everyone's individual concept of these techniques is going to get bigger and more complicated and more tailored to who they are. And if you just try to give that technique to someone else, the exact way that you did it, and you say, just do what I'm doing, without really giving them the context behind it, you're not really equipping them to understand why you're telling them this stuff. Because what they might find is that approach doesn't work for them, right? I mean, if your coach is 100 pounds heavier than you, at that weight class, there's going to be differences in the way that they do techniques. Little body type dimensions that you wouldn't think about. There's a lot of stuff for me that I can do real easily because of my particular dimensions. For example, I find it very easy to snake my hands into chokes. So, things like rear naked, getting under the chin, or Ezekiel chokes, I have very little trouble with doing that. But I also understand that for other people, that's a real fight. Then there's other things that I really struggle to do that other people can do effortlessly, like um Darce chokes, for example. My arm dimensions just make it very hard to nail a Darce choke. I don't have very long arms. And these kinds of things all in all, over time, they make a difference and they tailor your Jiu-Jitsu to be unique to you. So if you try to gatekeep a technique and if you try to say, hey, this is the way to do an arm bar because this is what always worked for me, you're depriving your students of a lot of context and you're also depriving them of the opportunity to develop their own thing. For a long time, I felt like my Jiu-Jitsu was just irredeemably bad because I would try to copy what my coaches did exactly and it would never ever work. And I realize now, if I actually look back at the stuff that I do that works for me, most of it is stuff I invented myself. There are very few times where I was taught a technique or I saw an instructional and I just copied that technique exactly and it just like fit into my game plan like the missing puzzle piece. That rarely happens. Most of the time, there's weird little tricks and innovations and customizations and things that I just started doing that work for me. And I I don't even know if you could call it good Jiu-Jitsu, but I know it works when I do it, so it's good for my purposes. This is a thing that everyone needs to realize that an individual technique, the way that you do it, that's not just a a technique. It's an expression of your journey through Jiu-Jitsu, like the rings in a tree, and you can't duplicate that exactly by just giving it to someone else. And I think a good coach knows that and that's where this whole gatekeeping thing can become dangerous because there are many coaches who will berate people if they don't do things exactly the way that they're supposed to look. And I think that you become a much better coach when you learn to loosen up and let people be creative and encourage that creativity because when they become a black belt, their techniques are going to look much different from yours or mine. And that's a good thing, right? And that's how this sport evolves and that's how we allow people to express their creativity and identity within Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 3: Yeah, I completely agree. I think that um it's hard because I can think of there's times as a coach because I completely agree with allowing for customization and people doing things. But I can think of a particular moment for me where this is back, I think I was either a purple belt or a brown belt. I was teaching the no-gi class at the gym that I was at because I was like one of the few people who liked there's no-gi. It was people for whatever reason that point in time were like gi more gi at my gym, but I luckily was able to teach the no-gi class. And there was a student in that class where he was just so creative. And I supported his creativity, but it was also frustrating to me because he would immediately, before he even got the version of it that I was attempting to share, would immediately be like, I'm going to do it this way instead. And a piece of me was like, I'm fine with you having multiple versions of doing things your way. However, like I think that as students, because I know I did the same thing, we will immediately look at a technique, look at some attribute of our body, whether our arms are too long, too short, too thighs are too thick, stomach's too big, hips aren't flexible enough and be like, I can't do that. So I'm going to make my own version immediately. Without understanding this piece that I'm changing, what the heck is this piece for? So a good example is open hips versus closed hips. So I do not have very flexible hips. So I do a lot of things with closed hips and it limits and slows down my entry to those things, but when I get them, they're much tighter. And so there's certain techniques where in order for the technique to work and have your opponent not be able to easily escape, your hip needs to be closed. However, this person had very, very flexible hips. And so they would always be like, I'm just going to do it with an open hip. And every single time that they would do it, their partner would escape. And so their thought was, oh, this technique isn't very good. I have to do something else. And they just and so they immediately like throwing the entire technique away. And for me, mind you, this is also like the insecurity of being a baby instructor, right? As a purple belt/brown belt. I've been already been teaching martial arts for a long time, but not a very experienced Jiu-Jitsu teacher at that point in time. And I was like, but like it's not I'm not teaching you bad Jiu-Jitsu. So a piece of it as a coach sometimes is your own ego of being like, this person doesn't want to do my technique. They think I have bad Jiu-Jitsu. I have to defend my Jiu-Jitsu. Like I think that was probably a part of it, but the other piece was like, you're missing out. Like I'm sharing with you a thing that could really work for you, but you're just doing it wrong. And I think as students, oftentimes, it's a lot easier to say, it's a bad technique or I'm too this or I'm too that. I'm too big, I'm too small, I'm too this, I'm too that. This technique's not for me versus realizing that most likely, whenever you're learning something, is that you've just missed something. Now, if current me were teaching the technique, I would explain like, this detail that I'm showing you, if I showed it with details, is to do this thing. And so you can change it, but make sure that in your new version, you have something that solves this problem. And I think for me, that's what's allowed me to be a lot more free in how I teach things is, it's not that I need you to look like me. But I do want whatever you end up doing to be thorough enough to handle all of the relevant kind of common problems that will occur in the context of what we're doing here, right? If we're doing a guard passing, someone being able to invert to recover guard is a real danger in any guard pass. So, whatever guard pass you're doing, you need to be able to address that. If you have an amazing guard pass, but it does not work if your partner can invert, I would say that unless you're going to just scout every single person you roll with and be like, I only do this on non-inverted people. I guess you could have it as a specialty technique, but I would say like, you could probably adjust that technique so that it can work on inverting people and non-inverting people. So I guess that's part of but even then like, and this is what's making it kind of hard for me as I try to evolve as a coach is like, who am I to say that their guard passes need to work on people that are inverting? Like I want them to have better Jiu-Jitsu, but at the end of the day, like if my student just wants to have fun and goof off and they don't actually care to get better, like and like succeed. If they're okay with the fact that they're going to beat everybody who can't invert, but they're going to lose to everybody who can invert, like, is it my job to make them? I don't know. I've that's kind of a good question. I've just ran myself into a corner there as I thought about it. Because I think it is. I think I should try to have them have standards for how they do things so that they can work against people and be effective. But I don't even know if that's a if that's a bridge too far. This is what I'm struggling with right now with this idea of being prescriptive and given freedom is like, where is the line as a coach where you say, this is my job and this is not my job. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. For me, oh God, I'll tell you a story here. I remember when I got it, it was either my brown or my black belt. I don't remember, but some far into my journey milestone and I remember my coach at the time gave me like a it was either a compliment or an insult or both. I'm not entirely sure. But you know how when you get like a big milestone like a brown or a black belt, often the coach says something kind of sort of nice about you in front of the room, like, this guy's really good at this, we love having him in the room, he's earned his belt and then everyone claps. For me, he said something to the effect of, it's really impressive and amazing how Steve has like been able to invent all of this Jiu-Jitsu stuff on his own. And I realized what he basically meant was, I wasn't listening to him. That was just his polite way of saying, this motherfucker never listens to me, he just does whatever he wants. And to some extent that's true, right? I mean, part of the reason I like the mental models approach is because I really struggle to just listen to what other people are telling me to do and duplicate it. I really need to kind of forge my own way and come up with my own system of thinking in order for something to make sense to me. And so I'm always kind of just doing my own thing and I'm probably worse at listening than I should be. But like with many things, in the traditional martial arts, they they actually have a term for this concept. I mean, we we rag on the TMAs a lot in Jiu-Jitsu because they're not always the most effective in a realistic fight. But in terms of ideas, I mean, there's thousands of years of knowledge of training that have been wrapped up into a lot of those TMAs and there are good lessons to be pulled from them. And one of them is, they've got a lot of great mental models and concepts for how to think about martial arts and skill development. And one of the concepts that I love, in Japanese, the term is Shuhari. Basically, what that talks about is the journey to mastery. And they propose that there's three stages to mastery. The first stage is you imitate, right? So you basically copy what your coach is telling you. The second is you start to break away, and that's kind of where you start to realize that there's limitations to what you're being taught. And then the third and final stage is basically you make it your own. This is where you are now driving your own journey. And I think that's a really effective way to look at this problem of how prescriptive should I be. In the beginning stages, it makes sense to be more prescriptive. Because if someone is completely new to this sport, they just, I mean, yeah, they might stumble on to how to do things properly. Given enough time, they probably will, but there's a lot of reasons to put heavy constraints on beginners. The most notable of which is just safety, right? Beginners are the most dangerous people on the mats. So, it makes sense to constrain them. And of course, the less knowledge you have, the less likely it is that you're going to stumble on to the right answer. But once someone starts to get more experience and they have a basis of knowledge and experience under which to draw on, it becomes more likely that they can intuit the right answer themselves. I mean, I find, and you tell me this, Charles, if you agree, but as a black belt, I can look at a technique without ever practicing it and have a pretty good idea just by looking at it of whether it's the kind of technique that would work for me. Like I don't even have to try it. I can just look at it and say, conceptually, there are reasons why I think this will work for me and I can explain quite clearly why that is. And I can do that because of thousands of hours of practice and being able to relate it to similar things I've done in the past and knowing the kinds of things that work for me and how this would integrate with my existing game plan. You don't have that basis of knowledge as a beginner. So as a beginner, I think it might make sense to kind of just, you know, be a little bit less creative out of the gate until you have at least a framework of what the heck this sport is. But then part of the journey of mastery is you start to back off from that and give people a little bit more leeway to experiment and make the sport their own. I really like that approach to thinking of things and I wonder if maybe that's something that aligns with your experience as well. Speaker 3: I think that would definitely align with how I learned. I think that um not entirely because I had a piece of my journey where I was training at an MMA gym and there was no class. It was literally just rolling. They just dropped you into the fire and they'd beat the crap out of you because their whole goal was to make sure that you weren't going to quit before they bothered to teach you anything. So we had a little time of like just getting beat up and seeing if we were tough enough to be worth teaching. And so in that situation, there was no model. But once I was started being taught like in a more traditional Jiu-Jitsu sense in a gi school, then yeah, it was a lot of what you're describing. But I do wonder about that, right? Because if I look at my journey, and I look at where I was in my Jiu-Jitsu journey, let's say five years in. And then I look at where these kids are today that are five years in. They're so far beyond where I was. And I think that it's because there's a lot more than just imitation and replication going on. I think the concepts are being taught earlier and the training methods are better. But and so like I do wonder, right? So if we look at the people who don't go that way. I'm still I guess I don't actually have the answer. Like I look at how I teach, I definitely because of how I came up, I do teach traditionally in some senses, but I'm also very I'm very conceptually heavy. I my obsession, the thing that I want to take to any of my students, even from the very beginning, is I want to give why and I want them to understand why they're doing what they're doing from the very beginning. So one thing that I did when I was teaching my fiance over the pandemic was I did not tell her something that almost every Jiu-Jitsu school tells you, which is never show your back, right? I think two classic ones most people from Jiu-Jitsu, never show your back and position over submission. Just said in almost every school. Speaker 2: Does this story end with us learning that your fiance is Priit Mikhelson? I just want to know if that's where this is going. Speaker 3: She is not, but ironically, I had learned Priit's system before we started dating and I definitely taught her his system as her fundamentals as an experiment. Because I'm like, I use her literally as a guinea pig and she didn't know any different. So for her, all of that stuff was the normal basics because that's she was literally like because of the pandemic, we couldn't train with anybody else. So she couldn't see anybody else and I showed her that defensive system and those postures as her fundamentals instead of saying you can't get people your back. And it did give her a great defensive like foundation and like is very hard to submit her, very hard to take her back. But at the very same time, it also like it goes both ways. I don't know that it's better or worse. It just I had problems that I had to overcome later on because I wasn't willing to show my back that I had to overcome to and I'm much better at Jiu-Jitsu now that I've broken through those. She never had that, but she has different problems because she didn't learn some of the more traditional stuff. And so like I don't actually know which way is better. Because at the end of the day, like she has her own journey. She's mostly a hobbyist. She's a very, very I think her understanding of Jiu-Jitsu because that's something that I obsessed with in the beginning. Like I wasn't I kind of defied the whole thing of I think it's an Eddie Bravo quote. I can't remember. I think he has a quote where he says something along the lines of there's no such thing as a stupid question unless you're a white belt, in which case, just shut up and do what your coach tells you. And um and I I was the complete opposite of that. Like she was a complete beginner and like I answered all the questions. I tried my best to make sure everything that I said had a why behind it. And so thus, she can understand the why and dissect techniques, I think, on a level way beyond her years in Jiu-Jitsu. However, I don't know that she got as much of the I guess because obviously she's just rolling with me, those kind of like white belt on white belt rolls in the beginning of her Jiu-Jitsu. Because it was the pandemic. She just had me and one of my friends Ralph, who was a purple belt at the time, was 20 pounds heavier than me. So she just had two giant guys to roll with. And so we both had to always kind of make sure we weren't injuring her because we had more experience and more size. And so she never got rolls with people her size for a while. And I think that definitely affected the the nature of her Jiu-Jitsu. Whereas if you have a more traditional school where you're going to do the exact techniques your coaches are telling you, you might not know why you're doing them, but you know you're supposed to do this. You just you just know you're supposed to look up on someone in a triangle. Why? I don't know. Coach says look up in triangles. You're supposed to never put one arm in. Why? I don't know. You're probably going to get triangulated. But you have all of these like rules that you're told, but you don't necessarily get given the why behind them. I tried my best when I was teaching her to always give her the whys and that had a certain result. And so I was like, I agree with that measure. And I think that that measure of growth of imitation, breaking away and then finding your own style is 100% an effective route. I don't know if it's necessarily the effective route. I think there's part of where I am in my Jiu-Jitsu right now is trying to reconcile all of the other ways of doing things. And even just this notion that being overly prescriptive can be a negative thing. Because I've always been um very open, especially like you would say in this situation, to upper belts and giving them and being open, but there is that idea of like, this is the fundamentals course and we're going to teach you this and you're going to learn this in kind of a rote fashion. But there's schools of thought that say that like that's not the best way. And so like I'm kind of in a in a state right now where I'm evolving my approach to teaching and I I don't have a a perfect answer to what I think is better because I I have examples, especially with kids, of friends that have taught day one beginners in a purely ecological way and like the kids are pretty good. I have experience of when I've taught non-Jiu-Jitsu people, right? Because it's a really cool thing I noticed I guess with being put in situations to teach non-Jiu-Jitsu people, it really makes you appreciate how good white belts actually are. Because I think a lot of times that teaching the fundamentals class, the white belt class, you get the feeling like, oh, they just don't know anything. But when you have a room full of white belts, some of them are day one, but you have your one month white belts, two month white belts, six month white belts and they all kind of help the entire room to function a bit better. But when you have a room full of like 30 people who've never trained before, they don't even have the language. And so doing everything, you have to kind of trick them. And so I remember like back in the day, I effectively without knowing it, was running an ecological class to trick like karate kids because I was teaching at my friend's karate school into doing Jiu-Jitsu. And a couple of games were like, I could trick these kids into doing guard passing drills in like a half an hour and they got really good at it. And I dare I say, I think that like they weren't going to come up with a knee slice, right? They weren't going to do that. They weren't going to come up, but they would come up with toreado on their own and they would come up with all kinds of things on their own. And so like, this is years ago, long before I even knew what the word ecological meant beyond like in the biological sense. And so like, I've had success with it in my history of teaching, even with people with no context. And that always brings out in my head and I've tried to teach that way and had some success as well. So like, but I've also had success teaching things the old fashioned way. And so like I'm in the it's really hard for me to decide. So I'm trying my best to I guess straddle the fence of trying to be effective without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Because I think in some cases when there's a new trend or a new fad, you're like, this is the way, right? And a moment it was like in Danaher we trust. Anything that John Danaher does not do is bad Jiu-Jitsu. And then it shifts over, oh, maybe the team the Pedigo guys, they're winning now. Maybe they're the new, you know, saviors of Jiu-Jitsu. And it's and we tend I think to whipsaw around with whatever the current top people are doing and making that the only way. When I think that very often like most of these people that have been successful are doing something right. And it's trying to figure out what and how to incorporate it into your style. I don't think that we need to abandon everything we've been doing our entire time just because there is another way. I think that we can integrate. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's a there's a attempt to make a smoothie out of these ingredients doesn't necessarily always work. I don't know. Speaker 2: Well, I don't think these things are necessarily opposed to each other. And again, on the topic of gatekeeping, I think when we talk about new ideas or new methods of training, I think people are kind of eager to sort of draw a hard differentiating line between, here's where the old system ends and here's where the new system begins. And I mean, you see you hear this a lot from the eco people, right? There can be no overlap between them, which I I don't agree with. One of the things about eco, I mean, if we're talking about being prescriptive, eco is still prescriptive. It's just prescriptive in a different way. When you're setting up constraints for people, you're prescribing to them what they must and must not do. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: But the difference is, you're allowing them some leeway to figure out the way to get from point A to point B on their own. Whereas I guess with the more traditional method, you're telling them exactly, you know, where every hand and leg must go. Eco is more relaxed in that capacity. It's more goal-focused than instruction-focused. And so I think there's some commonality between them. And I think it behooves people to look for ways to kind of bring things together, how to take the best from everything. And look, if something's not working for you, you don't have to use it. But I agree with you that many people when they're presented with a new option, the first thing they try to do is figure out, okay, do we have to throw out the old option now? And I don't think you have to do that always. In many cases, there's ways to kind of try to find a compromise or the best of both worlds. And that's something I think we should always be looking for when we're presented with a new training method. It's not all or nothing. People sometimes think, well, if there's a new approach, that means that the old approach is dead, time to move on and abandon that. Not only is that often not the case, but I think it can be dangerous because Jiu-Jitsu is cyclical, right? A lot of the things that didn't work five years from now, suddenly they might work again, right? I was sitting down a while ago with my brother and we were watching, I can't remember what fight event it was, but I was really surprised because it was no-gi and you had a bunch of the young athletes there. But man, it didn't look like what I kind of thought modern no-gi had become. It was very slow, pressure-based, very little movement. It kind of looked like what I would consider to be a classic pressure control game. And I I think a lot of that old school stuff is coming back now just because it is so efficient, right? And especially as grapplers get older, they're going to want to do that. There's an argument to be made that that old slow style has got a lot of value because in many ways it can make a fight very predictable and you don't have to burn as much energy to do it or take on as much risk. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 2: But there's also value in doing crazy new stuff as well. And one does not preclude the other. And I think that some of the best athletes are open-minded to basically just building up a game plan based on what works for them. They're not necessarily concerned about, okay, whose instructional am I copying or trying to duplicate, but rather they create their own unique thing by just picking up stuff that works for them. And the end result is you get some people like Victor Hugo then, who have very bizarre games because it's such a weird hybrid of old and new and big guy Jiu-Jitsu and little guy Jiu-Jitsu. And that makes you wonder, how much of these labels and distinctions actually really matter? I mean, if you've got giant guys doing fucking Berimbolos and crab rides, can we really say that there's a true difference between big guy Jiu-Jitsu and little guy Jiu-Jitsu? Maybe some stuff just works for some people and it doesn't work for others, or it works in one context but not in another. And maybe trying to draw all of these artificial lines, maybe that's just gatekeeping that prevents you from adopting stuff that you probably should be looking into. Speaker 3: I completely agree and I think that it goes down to what I was saying earlier, right? Like back when I was teaching, like when you go and show an inversion, half the room is just like, that's little guy stuff. Or if you do a pressure pass, then the light guys are like, well, we couldn't do that. Meanwhile, there's there's lightweights that do great pressure passing. And there's heavyweights that can Berimbolo, right? And I think it's that self-limiting view where I think a lot of people will will narrow themselves. And then going back into what you were talking about with the idea of prescribing the goals, like, I completely agree. I think there's a couple of things that I've always loved that eco does. One of them is is thin slicing things, right? Like one of the things I've always I've always loved in training is setting myself little little micro goals throughout the game. Now, I was setting them for myself because for whatever reason, I was never a very good driller. Like I would always get bored, I would lose focus. I would drill a few times to understand how something would work and then kind of chat with my training partner about like if they can give me some resistance here, resistance there and try to tinker with it. But I was outside of arm bars. Like I don't know why I can do that little swing back and forth arm bar left arm, right arm as fast as I can for speed. For whatever reason, that's like the only dead drilling thing I enjoy. I'll sit there and do 100 arm bars and be happy with it. But outside of that, almost every other dead drilling thing like, it just I was never good at doing it. And so like I just would lose focus. I would almost always drill my technique on people when we were rolling. I would experiment on people during rolls in the classic sense. I think Joe Rogan has said it, Marcelo Garcia has said it, Robert Drysdale has said it. Experimenting on blue belts. Because they know enough to give you reactions, but they don't know enough unless they're one of these like new age blue belt world champions to actually be a threat. And so you can experiment on them. And so I would always experiment on blue belts. But even then, by setting myself those constraints, like I've always liked the idea of constraint-based things and like to lead someone in a direction. So I completely agree with all of that. And I do think that at the end of the day, we just have tools and tasks and the tools get us to accomplish the tasks. And then the more granular that you make the tasks, the more prescriptive you are being. Because for example, like covering someone's hips to pass their guard is not a move, but it is a style. It's an approach to guard passing versus loose passing around the outside and trying to get to north-south. It's another style of passing. It's not necessarily a pass, right? It's not like you're saying, I want you to do the exact leg weave in the Saulo Ribeiro style. Well, okay, but you can do something where you're pinning the hips and legs. And so like, and even though it goes all the way back to I think why why leg locks were not accepted in Jiu-Jitsu, at least according to John Danaher and what I agree with him, which is that they don't fit the ladder of Jiu-Jitsu, right? The ladder of Jiu-Jitsu of sweeping, passing, advancing, submission and approaching to the top of the hierarchy, which is the back and doing a rear naked choke. Like leg locks, they break up that clear path of classic Jiu-Jitsu, but they still work. And so I think like understanding different paths and different approaches and then just like you said, but I also think that even inside of there, one of the cool things that happened with leg locks is that because they were being instructed outside of an established curriculum, everyone did them differently and you had a lot of things that you could consider ecological, like the inside position games or heel slipping games that are tiny slices of Jiu-Jitsu that you'd practice live. But you also had stuff that you could look at in the more traditional rote repetition drilling where you're trying to gain dexterity. When I first wanted to do the back step entry that Craig Jones did in EBI, I did that over and over again until I gained the coordination in my leg to do that without falling on my face. And so like, I do think that like habituating a technique to the point where like a group of movements is on autopilot for you is valuable. Like being able to do a bridge without telling your body, place feet, raise hips, turn head. That's necessary to have these complex movements saved almost like in a hot key inside of your body. And you can only get that to a degree through habituation. Now, is habituating it with context and with a training partner better than without? Absolutely. But I do think that there's certain degrees of coordination that you really gain from that habituation of of movement. And so like, I don't like it. To me, habituating movements and like gaining those repetition things, I don't enjoy it. But I know certain people who like they love drilling. I know people that love drilling dead. I know some people like the 10th Planet warm-ups. I have some friends in Japan who like they love doing the 10th Planet warm-ups. And like, it's beautiful when you watch them do the 10th Planet warm-ups. And they get great joy out of doing it. It's improved their Jiu-Jitsu, it works for them. I have other friends who deeply believe the 10th Planet warm-ups are the worst thing that happened to Jiu-Jitsu and they teach you bad habits and that they're the devil. And they think that they're terrible. I have I have some friends that think this thing these people are doing are just making them worse at Jiu-Jitsu. But these people that are doing them, they find value in them and they enjoy them. It brings them joy to practice them. And when they fall into one of those veins, they've done them so many times, they hit it like autopilot. And so like, who's to say who's right? And who's to say what are these tools for? Like I enjoy moments in Jiu-Jitsu where you don't have to reset. And so like, I'll arrange certain drilling that I do where I finish doing my part, you're set up to do your part and we can go back and forth because to me, the part of class I hated the worst was after we had to drill some complicated sequence, we have to bumble around and get back to the starting position. And I'm wasting 30 seconds of my class over and over again between each rep just resetting. To me, that was the part of drilling that was the most painful for me back in the day that I absolutely hated. Speaker 2: Well, I think a topic that we can tie this up on and something you touched on there is just the importance of joy in Jiu-Jitsu. And I bring this up because one of my big problems with gatekeeping in Jiu-Jitsu, telling people that you're not training the right way, you're not studying the meta, you know, you're not using the right method is ultimately you're being a buzzkill. And that's just going to make Jiu-Jitsu a lot less fun for people. It reminds me of that, you know, the old Big Lebowski meme of, you know, you're not wrong, you're just an asshole. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: That matters, right? I mean, you and I have worked in corporate, so you know this, right? Like engineers are notorious for this. They're so focused on being right that they'll be giant assholes in the process of making their argument to the point where nobody wants to listen to them. And it doesn't matter how right you are if people don't want to listen to you. So, I mean, there's a a communication style, actually, it comes from improv comedy and it's often called yes and thinking. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: And it pertains to the improv tactic of never saying no. If you are doing improv with someone, I mean, for those who don't know, like improv, my God, I am not smart enough to do it. But basically, it's where you invent the gags on the fly, right? Think of whose line is it anyway, something like that. It only works if the other person doing improv with you is riffing off of you. So you say something and then they pick up the ball and say, yes, and and they continue the joke. If they shut you down and say, nah, well, they they've killed the joke, they've killed the bit, they've made it awkward, things are dead. And that is always an important consideration when you're trying to be persuasive is to understand that there are consequences to shutting people down. Even if you're technically 100% right according to the books, if people don't want to listen to you, it doesn't matter how right you are. So in comms training, you're taught to balance this problem, right? On one hand, you of course, you want to be correct. You don't want to give people bad info. But on the other hand, you have to earn the right to be listened to. And if you're excessively gatekeeping, my big problem is that's a good way to suck the joy out of everything. I've been a part of a lot of communities that become very bureaucratic where people want to gatekeep everything and have 20 layers of approval. And the end result is, it kills people's motivation to be a part of the process. Now, if you were to ask me today, getting close to 20 years into my Jiu-Jitsu journey, what the single most important thing is in Jiu-Jitsu over the long term, I would say it's joy. It's having fun. That is more important than anything. Because look, we can talk about the importance of your training method. Your training method doesn't matter unless you're going to be consistent at it. And consistency isn't going to happen unless you're having fun. Everything in Jiu-Jitsu that we consider to be like a best practice or that we consider to be a good way to do things, it all rolls up to, is this fun? If you followed the perfect like Danaher-esque/ecological, whatever training method to a T, but everyone's miserable doing it, it doesn't matter how good your training is. It has to be fun for the people in the room. And that's where I take umbrage to the the idea of gatekeeping. Gatekeeping kills fun. It focuses on excluding people, on determining who's not part of my group, who can I keep out, rather than the opposite approach, which is, how can I bring people into the group? So, I always encourage people to think about that when they try to gatekeep, whether it be arguing about whether what the best training method is, or who's the best competition team, or what rule set is the best, or whether gi or no-gi is the best, or frankly, how you conduct yourself online. I manage a lot of communities and I got to say like the vast majority of the stuff that I see in terms of the way that people conduct themselves, even when they're trying to agree, they're gatekeeping. There's always this like underlying hostility and friction. People just don't know how to communicate effectively online. And if you really want to, you know, grow your presence in Jiu-Jitsu, grow your journey, if you really want to actually do great things here and be open to the ideas that will help you learn, you need to stop gatekeeping. You need to be willing to engage with other people and kind of at least understand what they're saying. That doesn't mean you have to do what they say, but you should at least be open to the idea. Speaker 3: No, that's that's absolutely brilliant. I completely agree. Like there's a big piece of my training that um I've taught this class multiple times in Globetrotters and the whole class is called why so serious. And literally it's a bunch of rolls and semi-live rolls where you have these random goals and they're mostly silliness where just to break up the monotony. Like not every roll has to be about victory. So for example, is like in one roll, your entire job is to see how long you can stay on top of someone with like a limp body, like a Zai Colt, the zombie drill. You just like fall, let your body fall asleep and see how long you can surf on them. Or another one would be that you're just trying to hold their foot in a taco grip and how long can you hold their foot? Or another one is and like there's just all of these silly things or maybe one you're just trying to run away the whole time. And like, some of these things do not work for a regular Jiu-Jitsu match. And so, but they're funny. And so like, it really you have to have a rapport with your training partner. If you have a training partner who's really serious and they're training for worlds and you're like, today I'm going to just disengage the entire time. You're going to piss them off and it's not going to be fun. It might be fun for you if you're trying to troll this person, but it won't be fun for everybody. But if you have another training partner who's just trying to have a good time and so you're going to try to, you know, like spin around their back or do nothing but Gramby rolls or I don't know, there's just so many random things that you can do that honestly, if you look at them, they're very ecological because I'm but I'm not I don't have to have my training partners be ecological for me to train ecologically. I can set my own constraints and roll with them and have fun. And I can also set some things that are that are silly and one of my favorite things that I've been doing in the past four years of my Jiu-Jitsu is finding things that I can do that make my training partner stop and laugh or stop and be like, ah, you son of a bitch. Like, like for example, I went to a Priit Mikhelson had a seminar in Orlando at Armada Jiu-Jitsu and the kind people there told me about it. I got to come down. I hadn't seen Priit in a year. And we were practicing doing some back escapes. And I had a training partner, he's a really good brown belt, really good wrestler, much bigger than me, a little older than me. And while we were both genuinely trying to get better at this, like I managed to try to go for a sneaky wrist lock while he was on my back. I didn't like break his wrist or anything, but I like I threatened it a little bit. And we both just stopped and laughed and we couldn't stop laughing. Did that or was that the perfect rep of seriousness and getting better at Jiu-Jitsu? No, but we both understood that he understood like, oh crap, I could wrist lock from there. And I understood, I got to make something funny happen. And I've I've found a bunch of fun little moves that that's their whole purpose. It could be trying to do some of the butt Judo stuff that I teach, which is a a way of doing Judo from the level. There's no injury, but there's moments in Jiu-Jitsu where you can catch someone really clean with something where they feel really light, they feel effortless and they know that you got them, but they're not hurt. And oftentimes, it's not an actual submission. I'm not submitting them, so they don't feel that that hit to the ego. But we can both acknowledge like, dude, that was cool. And to me, that was what got me into Jiu-Jitsu. Was like, I want to do cool stuff and I want to make it look effortless. I want Jiu-Jitsu to be magic again. And I think that when you let go of needing to be, at least at the black belt level, the unbeatable, all-knowing like Yoda black belt, well then suddenly you can goof off again and maybe you're going to get submitted by a blue belt or a purple belt or maybe you're going to they're going to catch you in side control. But you get to enjoy yourself again. You get to be free and explore. And I think that that exploration that most of us did when we were colored belts was the fun part. Like that idea that I'm bringing in a new team, right? So like we before the call, we were talking about Pokémon and there's like Pokémon, there's like Magic cards, there's all of these games. And one of the cool things that they have is that like even if you beat one of these games, you can get a whole new team of new people and then do it again. And to me, that that's part of what like playing a new game is. Like, I historically was not very good at triangles. So every time I get to hit a triangle on someone, I feel like a happy blue belt who hit his first triangle because it's not one of my best moves. I deeply understand it. I can teach triangles really well, but it just wasn't a move that I hit very often. And so I get to like replay that Jiu-Jitsu game and have fun. And I'm not trying to break people off. I'm just trying to to see if I can do some cool stuff and like tricking people and looking at new lines and avenues in Jiu-Jitsu or in wrestling or in everything else because I've been learning a lot looking at these little lanes from wrestling coaches and Sambo coaches and Jiu-Jitsu coaches and even like honestly, Instagram wrestling is really good. There's lots of amazing wrestling on Instagram and I just steal little bits of it. And when I hit it, I just try to make it silly and like me and my training partners get to laugh. And it doesn't have to be all about that bloodthirsty thirst for dominance. And I think it's a beautiful thing. Speaker 2: You want to hear a story about fun and gatekeeping? I've got something that just actually happened in the last few days that I can share. Speaker 3: Yeah, let's do it. Speaker 2: Okay, so two of the guys in our community are Thomas and Philip from Good Mind Grappling. I don't know if you know them, but they're uh basically they run a wrestling club up here in Canada and they are extremely elite wrestlers, like national champion level. And I was joking around, something I've been kind of teasing for the last while is, wouldn't it be fun to have a, what I guess you could call a fucked up Jiu-Jitsu tournament where basically it's a tournament you run, but with some just weird goofy variants to the rules, just for fun, just to see what happens. And the one I joked about was, like we always talk in Jiu-Jitsu about how, you know, you should never start from the knees because that's not realistic. Well, what if we had a tournament where you were only allowed to be on your knees? No standing up. You can't ever stand up, even to pass the guard. If both of your feet get up, you know, you get penalized or you get DQ'd. What would happen if we had Jiu-Jitsu in that rule set? Because that we're always taught, don't start, you know, wrestling from the knees is dumb. Speaker 3: Yeah, most wrestlers are really angry about that. They're like, knee wrestling is bullshit. Speaker 2: Yeah, but then I realized, well, you know what, if you spend all of your time telling people that shit is stupid, they're not going to bring it up if they think you're just going to shoot it down, right? So, how many other things in our community are like this where there are people actually doing things and getting results doing them, but we've put up these walls where they're not even willing to share those ideas because they think they're going to get laughed at, right? So, I thought that was an interesting idea and now I think I'm going to have to set up some sort of tournament, which is like knee wrestling only. Speaker 3: I would love that. So fun fact, a couple of fun things about that. Thing number one, I had had a similar idea because I've had this notion of side quest Jiu-Jitsu for a little while. This idea of having little like hidden missions that people have to complete during their matches. And I had the idea of I've been including it in a tournament where like you could have a tournament where that you don't that the winners of the tournament get $1. But that we you hand out like quests that are on the side where like you could and it would be a round robin tournament. But if you complete your quest, you might win $100 or $50 or something. But your quest cannot be submitting your opponent or or something. It has to be something that is kind of out there, kind of weird like what you're talking about. And I the whole idea was the side quest Jiu-Jitsu and then you could even have the audience of the tournament like make suggestions and so like that you might have somebody who like loses all their matches and they end up getting last place and the winner gets a dollar, but this person has like $300 because they've managed to like boop someone on the nose 30 times of the quest of the tournament or like do do whatever silliness or they surfed on somebody. And that was a a similar idea. So second thing, Judo, I don't know if it's USA Judo or what country's Judo is doing it, is trying to start their own series of Nawa tournaments. And one of the rules is that you're not allowed to stand all the way up on your feet. Exactly like what you're talking about. Speaker 2: This would be amazing. I think we got to do it. I think it would be hilarious. And I love I love the side quest idea too. Speaker 3: I'm going to come to Canada. I would love to collaborate with you. So whenever you have your fucked up Jiu-Jitsu tournament, I want to be a part of it. So let me know. I would love to come to what part of Canada are you in again? I forgot. Speaker 2: Vancouver. Speaker 3: Vancouver, that is on West Coast. West Coast. Speaker 2: We're Seattle's hat. Speaker 3: All right, I'm interested. I would love to come to Vancouver. I've never actually been there. The only part of West Canada I've been to is Victoria once and that was forever ago. So. Speaker 2: Nice, nice. Well, great chat, man. Is there anything else that we want to plug? If people want to follow you or work with you or check out your content, how do they do that? Speaker 3: You can find me at CharlesHarriott.com or you can find Harriott is spelled H A R R I O T T. I have five different instructionals, four of my own, one with Chris Paines on BJJ Fanatics. Once again, Charles Harriott. If you want some free stuff, go to YouTube, type in Charles Harriott. I've got a bunch of videos with BJJ Globetrotters and some of my own. If you my newest instructional on Fanatics is the Compass Knee Bar system. I'm a big fan of it. The biggest thing I've had the most fun with lately is doing Patreon and mostly honestly working with other black belts. Like usually black belts, like I'm in my late 30s, black belts in their late 30s, 40s, like kind of giving them tactics to not be bored anymore or learn some new things as well as um how to deal with these young spry instructional devouring purple belts that are that can be a problem. But really people of all belts, I've really enjoyed the customization of it. So I have different levels on my Patreon, but at the two highest levels, one I get I do custom videos for people. At the highest level, I do both custom videos and I do custom um Zoom calls where I do chats with people. And honestly, those have been the most rewarding thing to just talk to people about how their Jiu-Jitsu is going, make a custom video, send them on kind of like a little plan for their Jiu-Jitsu and then to hear back with them the following weeks or months about how it's going and then keep customizing and giving them ideas. In the case of some people, I give them ideas as to how to like adjust how they're teaching their students. And other people, it's like, oh, there's this one guy who always beats me up and I gave him some tactics to be like, well, maybe this guy you can talk to him, you can roll harder, roll softer, we can adjust these tactics, try to do this specific training. So like, I've had a really good time helping people on that journey and creating a quite a few videos. If you join the site, I think the $10 level and up, you get access to everybody else's videos as well as your own. And yeah, it's the Patreon thing along with private lessons because I'm in Florida. I've been getting a lot of private lesson students and group private students and I really think just enjoy teaching small groups of people because I can really hone in on what they're trying to accomplish and give them some advice or something to practice and then hearing that it worked out for them is like really my favorite thing. I really, really enjoy hearing about how it went. It's one thing to get to teach someone a seminar and then I never see them again and I have no idea if it worked out or not. But getting to hear from people afterwards is really one of my favorite things to be able to be like, hey Charles, what you taught me is crap, it doesn't work. And I could be like, oh, I'm so sorry. Or to hear, dude, I tried the thing and it worked and it was awesome. And it's like, that kind of being able to help people enjoy their time on the mats a little bit more and get curious and get excited. That's what I love, man. I really, really love the Patreon thing as well as the private lessons. I'm anything if you're anywhere in Florida, I will come to your area most of the time. I have my family's in South Florida, so I go down there once a month to go see my mother. And so I have actually I think either due to this podcast, the BJJ Fanatics podcast, I gained a a student who I now see whenever I see my mother. He lives about half an hour from my mother and every time I go down there, I now see him and I give him regular private lessons. Thanks to one of these podcasts. I can't remember if it was because of your podcast on Mental Models or the BJJ Fanatics podcast, but thanks to me being able to do this, I now have uh a new student/friend and I'm not his main coach, but I'm able to provide value. So, peace up to Alfonso, you're awesome and I hope to see you soon. Speaker 2: I'm taking credit for it. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, if people want to check all of that out, I will make it easy. I'll put the links in the show notes. You know, I always tell people, one of the best decisions that you can make in Jiu-Jitsu, like support the people who are trying to add value to the community. It really isn't that much. I mean, there's a lot of amazing Patreons and other resources out there that make a first of all, the amount of value you get off of those is usually outsized compared to what you have to pay. But also on top of that, you get the opportunity to support people directly. And in a sport where again, there's growing monetary opportunities, but still not as much as we would want. I always tell people, you know, just joining a $10, $20 subscription to support a creator of yours that you like, that makes a huge difference. So if you can afford it, do consider doing that. Again, I'll put links to your stuff in the show notes. I'll also put a link to all of our stuff. We're easy to find. Everything we make lives at BJJMentalModels.com. All episodes of the podcast, both the full-length ones like this and our mini concept breakdowns, they're all there, completely free. You got six years worth of content there to listen to. If you're overwhelmed by that, which happens, just DM me on social media or send me an email, tell me your problem. I can always point you in the direction as to what I think you should listen to first to focus on. And of course, if you want to take it to the next level with us, that's what BJJ Mental Models Premium is for. We've got the world's biggest library of courses delivered through audio. The nice thing about that format is we can focus on talks like this, right? Talking about ideas, strategy, tactics, concepts, even the philosophy of how to grapple. These are things that tend not to get covered very well in video instructionals. We've also got an amazing series of podcasts that you can only get access to as a premium subscriber. For an example, Emily Kwok's podcast, Rob Bernacki's podcast, those are exclusive to BJJ Mental Models Premium. So if you want those, join that. Um there's also an amazing community. Many people join just to get access to the community alone. And of course, we also do direct coaching as well. If you go up to our coaching tier, we can connect you with some of the best black belts in the world, regardless of where you are, what time zone you are, and we can get you customized, tailored feedback that will be appropriate for really grapplers of any level. So again, all of that lives at BJJMentalModels.com. I'll put links to all of our stuff and all of your stuff, Charles, in the show notes. But Charles, I always love these chats, man. They're always great and informative. Glad we were able to make this one happen. So thanks again for coming by, my friend. Speaker 3: Yeah, always a pleasure, man. Much love. Speaker 2: You too, buddy. And thanks to the listeners as well. We'll talk to you next time. See you then.